Rabbids Go Home

Tuesday 1 December 2009 11.40 EST
First published on Tuesday 1 December 2009 11.40 EST

Bwaaaaaah! What's that noise? Just the rabbid in your Wiimote rattling about and bouncing off the walls, probably because you've spraypainted him orange, stamped on some tattoos, put his head in a vice, and topped the whole thing off with an octopus hat.

You'd be bwaaaaah!ing too. Ubisoft's neat little trick of giving you three rabbids with which to complete your mission – one pushing an old supermarket trolley, one atop it, and that pesky one you're told is in your controller – sets the tone for Rabbids Go Home. A departure from the previous Rabbids titles in that it's more platform than minigame and doesn't rely so heavily on the novelty of the Wiimote, its characters are still every bit as anarchic - and this time there's no annoying Rayman to dilute their screen time.

Using the nunchuck as your main controller, you guide the rabbids' trolley around the city's sewers, filling it with objects and junk to be delivered back to Rabbid HQ. The critters have it in their heads that they need to build a pile of rubbish to the moon, from where (they think) they came. Each area has lots of small bits of trash to be collected up, along with one big item that scores you the majority of your points. Get enough, and the prizes you win unlock extras to allow you to customise your rabbids with tattoos and the like. For the main point, all this collecting is lots of fun: repetitive fun at points, certainly, and without a decent difficulty curve which can be annoying as you do the same task over and over. It does sometimes feel that you're whizzing round the beginning part of the game just to get it done with, rather than because it's challenging – extra tasks and moves are introduced, but essentially you're really controlling the trolley (which doesn't have a jump button); bwaaaaah!ing at humans to shake all their clothes off, which you can then collect, or dogs to make them die, or objects to make them give up their junk; and shooting the rabbid cannonball that is inside your Wiimote.

Rabbids Go Home

What makes Rabbids good is the goofy creatures themselves. There are lovely animations between areas, some great graphics (although, as you can't control the camera angle, they're not always shown off to their best), and a kind of anti-consumption message throughout. The rabbids, running about collecting tat basically, are juxtaposed with over consuming humans and their humdrum lives. Quite how that tallies with you going out and buying a) a(nother) console and b)the game, I'm not quite sure. And at times it gets preachy, particularly because while most of the areas are varied, they do repeat to an extent, leaving you overdosed on anticonsumerism. If you can cope with that, though, Rabbids Go Home gives the Wii a decent platform game of its own. Unlike its predecessors, it's not up to much if you're playing with a friend (the 2-player mode is frankly uninspiring), and the narrative arc is a little lacking. But it's absorbing, good looking, and as long as you share their taste in music, the rabbids are manic but sometimes hilarious gaming companions.